So, in the interest of not cluttering this thread with a bunch of back and forth about my woes, just letting everyone know that I'm sorta kinda back in business now. Nothing to see here, move along!
My Uber Laptop is back in business. It only has dual 1080s, but those will render faster than a single 1080 Ti (I've tested this in the past) so my render speeds should be a little faster at least.
It's a long story, and I may eventually need to remove a daughter headphone board to solve my boot issue (it's most likely the thing causing this laptop to hang on boot, based on other's experience in 'solving' this issue on a more permanent basis) but for now the plan is to just use 'sleep mode' instead of shutting it down completely for the next few weeks. For now, I'm in the 'leave well enough alone' camp...
I'm probably going to put a 12GB RTX 3060 'shortie' card in my interim rendering rig to replace the 1080 Ti (They render just a bit faster than a 1080Ti in Octane Render), but right now, as noted above, good luck finding one. I see some on Amazon that are marked up 250%(!)... Yeah, not paying that, I'm good for now.
I'm typing this on my Uber Laptop (my internet connection is a USB thingie). I updated the drivers, and Microsoft FINALLY solved the 19% VRAM tax issue close to a year ago, so I should have around 7.5GB available for scenes (remember that VRAM doesn't stack), which isn't too far off from the 9 GB limitation on my other rig, which I decided to isolate from the internet when I built it, so it hasn't been updated in years....
Uber Laptop has an 18.4" screen (only 1080P though, wasted opportunity by MSI IMHO), and has a 'true' mechanical keyboard (no chiclets here!). The switches are MX Cherry silvers, but just has red backlit keys (no RGB here). The laptop is several years old, and I paid a lot of money for it at the time, so I'm all about squeezing as much life out of this thing as I can, now that I managed to get it to boot agan. It still hangs, but I 'mostly' have a workaround for now, I just need to wait for the laptop to get past the splash screen...
Not that anyone cares, and I wouldn't recommend buying one used unless you like dealing with hardware issues (mainly the boot thing, and the flimsy electrical plug at the back), but:
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You really should just buy a desktop though, those are upgradeable...
I still need to transfer a bunch of files over to this rig via an external drive (my 'next' Daz install is already set up on an external drive in anticipation of an eventual upgrade). I should be 'back in business' and working on FmF again in a day or two.
I don't like to post in fanart threads unless there's a pic to share, so here's a render I did a few days ago, using that 1080 Ti that failed yesterday...
